Thursday, February 6, 2025

Content and Quests Continues

I got a good bit of work done yesterday evening, just progress on content. I brushed up a bit of conversation in the Farmhouse with Joe, I started making a quest, then got sidetracked fixing a bug (fixed it!) in the editor that was stopping one thing, that didn't then pass information onto another thing, which means that if I changed something quests wouldn't work in the game. So you know, as it turned out, one thing was called "event" when it should have been called "eventID" on line (I'm not even joking) 9995 of a javascript file in the editor... and quests didn't work.

Right, rant over.

So, as I thought before, it's a lot easier making quests and conversations for NPCs when the world is sort of built up. I can use stuff I've created to weave into the quest text or conversation dialogue "Careful, there's loads of brown bears in that area" or "past Finger's Retreat along the coast" and that sort of thing - then as the player travels, they'll come to the right area, get the game journal show they are entering the right area, and then brown bears pop up on screen.... you know you're in the right place.

I've also been setting up some infrastructure for a proper beta, so there will be a discord community set up, looking to capture good feedback and work through issues, as well as maintain some to-do lists and the like.

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Rust and Timber Farmhouse

I had some fun today, filling out the Rust and Timber Farmhouse, which until now was mainly empty this evening. I also did some other bits, but thought this would make for a nice little update.

The farm offers all manner of food and drink, and might just start a quest or two off as well. Joe, as always hovering around the front desk ready to help anyone as needed, with Megan further in the shop making everything look easy.

Monday, February 3, 2025

World Building Progress

It's been quite a whirlwind at work recently, so not conducive to being in a great head-space after work and then getting into code or content building, but I have made some progress over the weekend nonetheless.

I've filled up all the Floren Islands with zone information, spawn locations and have been importing new assets. I've been creating items, loot tables and encounters to fill them with.

I think there's a bit more of this to do, but it's shrinking, then I will add in NPCs through the world I've created and give them conversations and quests.

In a recent post, I did outline a list of code things I need to get done, I've not really progressed on those, but for now, that's fine. I don't think any of those are show-stoppers.


Sunday, January 26, 2025

Blighted Isle and Floren Isles Being Filled

It's been much longer between posts than usual, and part of that is that I've taken a few days off from development - in part to recharge, in part because work was quite demanding and lastly, in part as I had a lot of stuff to get done around the house.

Having started with that, I can get into the fun stuff.

I've been building out the world quite nicely. Much of the Western Isle is now done in terms of regions, spawns and so on. The Western isle ranged from wildlife to bandits, orcs and even some trolls. I'm currently working on the Blighted Isle, which is full of skeletons and I'll round out the Eastern Isle probably today with some wildlife in general. That will leave me the cave system to fill out - which will be a mix of goblins and others.

As I'm going, I'm building out the items and loot-tables for all these which is quite fun, but takes a good bit of time. Even giving various creatures abilities to use and setting them up take a bit of effort.

Once that's done today or tomorrow, I'll be going in with NPCs to pop them in, and creating conversations, quests and generally content. I've got a teeny bit of world still to create, I found a bit of unfinished cave system as I was adding in spawns earlier, and I have to finish up the interior of one of the trading houses - but that's not a lot of work.

In terms of code, there's a few things on my to-do list:
There's a bug that sometimes makes things in combat wait way too long before they can activate again. Not quite sure what that is, but I hope it should be quick when I investigate it.
I would like to have items be able to initiate quests. There's going to be a bit of work there in terms of UI changes and some structure changes.
I would like items to be able to proc effects, so a weapon that has a chance of applying it's own debuff to the target. Perhaps armor that has a chance of applying a buff to the wearer when they are hit. Again a bit of work, but I will tie that in with the quest thing.
I have found a bug when a ranged skill is selected to use, but then cancelled, the screen doesn't fully go back to the right mode. Probably an easy fix once I find the right bit.
And the last thing I need to add in is some functionality around spawns. While I already have the functionality to spawn something based on events - ie, if you're on a quest to go clobber a certain critter, it will be added to the normal spawns there, what I'd like is to be able to have a particular thing spawn in an exact spot if you're up to a quest part.
Sorry. Last, last thing. I'd like to add in some events for the day/night cycle, the weather cycle and probably the Ebb cycle and over time, have certain things triggered by those - ie, bandits come out at night. Something else happens only when it's raining and so on.

Monday, January 13, 2025

Loads of Little Things

I've been chipping away nicely at a whole assorted chocolate-box of various tweaks, fixes and additions to the code.

In no particular order:

I've added long-needed functionality to my animation editor, that lets me import creature animations that face left, and mirror them in the editor so that there's a copy that faces right as well. It's been very low on my to-do list for a very very long time, but my recent additions of models that only have a left/right facing (and only come in one of those from the artists) has made it an utter necessity. I did do some manual image-editing-software left/right copies to test out how the models looked and performed in-game, and they're worth it.

I've also been working on importing a lot of new assets into the engine, as well as just spending some money on purchasing a bunch more from a particular artist. His stuff sadly is only two directional (left and right) but they look good, there's a lot of variety and the app loads them up basically instantly which is great.

I've also been working on adding a bunch of items into the game. Which reminds, me, I actually made some big changes to the editor setup where I create loot tables, making a very basic and placeholder interface much much better. The image shown is my editor interface for one particular drop type, in this case the sort of gear that many goblins will drop. I've got tools to filter any possible items at the bottom, can click on them to show me the stats, to make sure it's the right item, and can click on them to add them to the possible list of items - as well as setting up changes of drops, how many come out, whether events are required for the item, or block the item coming out at all. In other words, it's all finally clean, neat and easy to use. Just in time for me get cracking on the world!

Edit: Oh, I also realized, I'd missed an item functionality, that I can't believe I missed. There's nothing in there currently that lets certain items have a chance of a particular effect coming out. So, say a heavy hammer item might have a two percent chance of adding a debuff on a successful hit, and so on. That will need to be fixed somehow, and I've got a few ideas on how I might make that even better, so it's not purely just the weapons, but that's another day problem to solve.

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

User Preferences Framework Setup

One of the things that's been half enabled, but not really implemented was dynamic changes in the app. I half unlocked it before, fixing a zoom-in and zoom-out when combat started/ended but I took it a step further over the last few evenings as well as setting up a proper android-based user preferences setup.

So, you can now set your own preferences for combat and normal terrain views as well as text sizes for characters/creatures. It happily saves them to your device and the game boots up with those retained next time you log in.

While it's currently only those two, there's a whole entire list of things I'd like to set up preferences for, so with the framework set up now, it should be much easier to chip away at a feature here or there.

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Magic Transitioning With Ebb

It's been a damned long day, but one thing that made me very happy was logging into the app where I'd left off yesterday, and opening up the Ebb screen, to see how things had progressed nicely in the best part of a day since I left it last night.

Everything is working exactly like it is supposed to.Each of the faces is lining up with where it should be.

:chefs kiss:

The different periods for each of the moons are moving along nicely at their own pace - and the balance between Entropy and Chaos  seems to be working just where it should be, but I'll keep an eye on it to make sure it's spot on with where it should be.

Content and Quests Continues

I got a good bit of work done yesterday evening, just progress on content. I brushed up a bit of conversation in the Farmhouse with Joe, I s...